The semiconductor industry continues to improve the integration density of various electrical components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) by continual reduction in minimum feature size, which allows more components to be integrated into a given area. Also, to further increase the integration density within an integrated circuit (IC) package, new packaging technologies, such as 2.5 dimensional (2.5D) integrated circuit (IC) packaging or three dimensional (3D) IC packaging compared with conventional two-dimensional (2D) IC packaging, have begun to be developed. 2D IC packaging refers to binding one IC die on one packaging substrate, 2.5D IC packaging refers to bonding multiple IC dies on a common interposer, and 3D IC packaging refers to stacking multiple IC dies one over another.
Various types of circuits, which sometimes require different electrical/mechanical characteristics, do not have to all be manufactured on the same die using the same manufacturing process. In consolidating a processing unit and a memory circuit in a single IC packaging, 2.5D IC packaging and 3D IC packaging are capable of accommodating a greater number of input/output (I/O) terminals (also referred to as I/O pins) connecting the processing unit and the memory circuit than that of a system without using 2.5D IC packaging or 3D IC packaging.